Why would you want an affiliate program?

Say you know an influential person in your industry – a popular blogger, an Instagram personality, etc.

They’ve got a strong connection to your product – or maybe you send them a free sample.

You want to reward that person for sharing your product in a way that’s incredibly beneficial to you both.

But neither of you really know how much you should pay for a sponsored post (and sponsored posts are risky… what if they’ve bought fake followers?)

Instead, you add them to your affiliate program, and offer them a commission on any sales they send to you.

They share your products with their followers, their followers buy your products, you reward the affiliate.

What businesses are affiliate programs suited for?

Affiliate programs are well-suited to most types of businesses. In particular, industries like fashion, beauty, technology, food, and lifestyle brands.

The key question to ask is this: does your industry have highly influential people who can organically share your products with their audience?

If so, you want to invite those people to be your business’s affiliates.

Affiliate programs vs referral programs?

Affiliate programs are when you pay the affiliate a commission based on referred sales to your store. Say, you pay them 20% of sales of all the customers they send to you.

Characteristically, you’ll have a small number of affiliates who reach a large audience.

Referral programs are more of a friend-to-friend exchange. You can offer a customer a discount off their next order if they tell a friend about your store.

This often looks like “Send a friend $10 off, and you’ll get $10 off your next order.” You typically wouldn’t pay a referrer a percentage commission in a referral program. (Would a referrer really be encouraged by a 10% commission on a $25 order?)

These are much more natural, small-scale interactions between regular people. Anyone can sign up for the referral program – they don’t need to be able to reach a large audience… they just send a message to their friends.

If you’re looking for a guide to setting up a Squarespace referral program, check out Peach’s.

How to set up an affiliate program on Squarespace?

To set up our affiliate program, we’ll use Tapfiliate – an easy way to set up an affiliate program across a wide range of stores, including Squarespace.

Follow our guide and you’ll have your affiliate program up and running in ten minutes, and you’ll be able to invite influential affiliates to help grow your store.

Once you’ve added the code from Tapfiliate, your Code Injection settings should look like the screenshot below. Note: You might need to save the “Order Confirmation” field twice – there’s a bug in Squarespace that sometimes prevents it saving correctly

After you’ve saved, you can use Tapfiliate’s testing feature to check if everything is correct. Click their button, and you should see a big banner at the bottom like in the screenshot below.

Then place a test order in your store – either by switching your Squarespace store to Test Mode, using a 100% off coupon, or placing an order and immediately refunding (any of these options will work)

Once that’s done, your Tapfiliate testing panel will show a check next to “Tapfiliate conversion code detected”

Once that’s done you’re good to go! Your affiliate program is up and running, and you can start inviting affiliates